Wind and Solar Are Crushing Fossil Fuels
April 6th, 2016Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand.
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Via: Bloomberg:
Wind and solar have grown seemingly unstoppable.
While two years of crashing prices for oil, natural gas, and coal triggered dramatic downsizing in those industries, renewables have been thriving. Clean energy investment broke new records in 2015 and is now seeing twice as much global funding as fossil fuels.
One reason is that renewable energy is becoming ever cheaper to produce. Recent solar and wind auctions in Mexico and Morocco ended with winning bids from companies that promised to produce electricity at the cheapest rate, from any source, anywhere in the world, said Michael Liebreich, chairman of the advisory board for Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF).
“We’re in a low-cost-of-oil environment for the foreseeable future,” Liebreich said during his keynote address at the BNEF Summit in New York on Tuesday. “Did that stop renewable energy investment? Not at all.”
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The reason solar-power generation will increasingly dominate: It’s a technology, not a fuel. As such, efficiency increases and prices fall as time goes on. What’s more, the price of batteries to store solar power when the sun isn’t shining is falling in a similarly stunning arc.
Just since 2000, the amount of global electricity produced by solar power has doubled seven times over. Even wind power, which was already established, doubled four times over the same period. For the first time, the two forms of renewable energy are beginning to compete head-to-head on price and annual investment.
Some coworkers at my power utility were discussing the implications of that methane leak in southern California. They say that managers of the grid in California are expecting there to be a crunch this summer because they actually needed that methane (every morning energy traders review which power plants are down either for maintenance or unexpectedly). You could almost wager that Oregon or Texas will have to send California power this summer, although in the next decade, rooftop solar will cause California to export electricity during the daytime.